Horizons Are skimmers extremely shy?

[careBear1]

Taking several destroy skimmer missions, which I have had to abandon - at great cost to my rep and value of other missions.
Simply cannot find the skimmers. I have rocketed the bases to death, guns generators, etc and been inside, but no skimmers.
Have flown patterns over poi to no effect.
Have driven around for hours in the srv inside poi but found nothing other than a few shiny rocks.
Given up. Seems that at times ED is designed for maximum frustration.
Please could someone give me the key to finding skimmers. At the moment this part of the game is simply dead to me.

 

[punkerich]

Easy, pal. You don't exactly need to kill skimmers AT the base, every POI in the vicinity will do. As long as your position (bottom left HUD) shows the name of the facility you'll be fine. I usually land in ~5km distance to the settlement, then circle it searching for POI's with the wave scanner.
This way, the skimmers will be wanted 99% of the time, so no bounties on my head.

 

[Justor]

I have seen that as well, I had one base that wouldn't produce Skimmers to save my life. Most of the time a jump out of the system and coming back will "reset" the Skimmers or other mission targets. But I had this one base that wouldn't produce them.

Both the missions for killing Skimmers were on the same planet! One base had 4 Skimmers when I blew then up no more would come back. I jumped out of the system and came back and saw there was 4 more Skimmers and then blew up 2 and mission completed. But the other base was just as careBear1 was saying. No matter how much trespassing and damage was done, nothing other than turrets. Jumped out of the system 3 times and came back. No love there at all!

I will have to try punkerick tip next time and see if POI near that base will fill the bill. But that is misleading when the game says they will be at the base, it should say the base and surrounding areas.[up]

 

[punkerich]

I have seen that as well, I had one base that wouldn't produce Skimmers to save my life. Most of the time a jump out of the system and coming back will "reset" the Skimmers or other mission targets. But I had this one base that wouldn't produce them.

Both the missions for killing Skimmers were on the same planet! One base had 4 Skimmers when I blew then up no more would come back. I jumped out of the system and came back and saw there was 4 more Skimmers and then blew up 2 and mission completed. But the other base was just as careBear1 was saying. No matter how much trespassing and damage was done, nothing other than turrets. Jumped out of the system 3 times and came back. No love there at all!

I will have to try punkerick tip next time and see if POI near that base will fill the bill. But that is misleading when the game says they will be at the base, it should say the base and surrounding areas.[up]

It's the way FD handle position detection. As long as the left bottom hud indicates you're in the right area, you... well. Are in the right area. Same goes for finding USS's in space, around a particular body.

 

[CMDR Minion Blob]

Try landing approx. 20kms from the target installation, then head towards it in the SRV. Depending on terrain, etc. you may have to adjust a few km's farther or closer. Increase your SRV's sensor to max range and listen to high-pitched sounds that may indicate skimmers or at least POI's in that direction. Keep heading towards target settlements but scan towards left and right as well once in a while.

Skimmer POI's are randomly generated; sometimes can be right on top of one another in other times finding them can take awhile. You can also search for the blue circles indicating POIs from the ship above 2km altitude but most smaller POIs (skimmer perimeters are no longer detectable from the ship so I just usually remain in the SRV until I have found and killed enough of them to complete the mission.

I have also found that sometimes doing surface prospecting can also stimulate generation of Skimmer POIs (mission targets). Could be a coincidence I suppose but it did occur quite a few times to be worth it especially if you need more mats.